The Defense and Tech Podcast

From commanding an IDF electronic-warfare unit to brokering defense-tech M&A, Michael Cukierman explains the $1 billion drone threat that no jammer can stop.

In this episode of The Defense and Tech Podcast, host Anna Ahronheim sits down with Michael Cukierman, Partner and Head of the Defense Division at Cukierman & Co. Investment House, for a rare view from both the battlefield and the boardroom. Cukierman traces how the drone threat mutated in real time: from commercial quadcopters bought off eBay and Amazon, to 3D-printed DIY drones, to today's fiber-optic drones that carry no RF signal to jam. "The threats in the battlefield change on a monthly basis," he says, and each shift opens a new race for a solution: "There is a $1 billion race to find the solution," and this time it has to be kinetic.

He also breaks down the layered logic of counter-drone defense, detection, identification, decision, interception, and the layer he thinks companies keep underestimating: command and control. Then the conversation turns to money and markets: why European buyers still look to Ukraine over Israel, how an Israeli firm went head-to-head with a Ukrainian company in a Rheinmetall tender, why manufacturing (not technology) is the real bottleneck to scaling, and how defense sensors end up as medical hearing aids. Looking to 2030, Cukierman argues the front line will be largely automated, with human operators pushed to the rear.

What makes this interview different is the dual vantage point: Cukierman has operated counter-drone systems in the field and now advises on the deals that take them global as part of the M&A Worldwide alliance. For anyone tracking defense-tech investment, the drone-vs-counter-drone arms race, or Israel's place in a shifting global market, it's a grounded, jargon-tested read on where the money and the threats are heading next.

European governments condemn Israel publicly while their purchase orders arrive quietly, says IL Ventures co-founder Yoni Heilbronn, and interests, not politics, now decide everything.

Heilbronn, who built automotive cybersecurity pioneer Argus before launching IL Ventures in 2021, argues the post-World War II order is finished. "Globalization as we knew it is pretty much dead," he tells the Jerusalem Post's Anna Ahronheim, describing a world of "real politik to the extreme" where geopolitical shocks hit corporate balance sheets within days rather than years. The consequence he thinks leaders underestimate: supply chains have not just shortened, they have fractured, and every country is now solving for itself.

That fracture is where Israeli technology comes in, and where Heilbronn is unusually candid about the limits. He is openly skeptical that the defense tech gold rush suits venture capital at all, citing sales cycles and a thin field of acquirers. He explains Pax Silica, the US-led semiconductor alliance that placed Israel and Qatar under the same framework, and why he thinks Brazil, Mexico, and Southeast Asia matter more to Israeli startups right now than the well-worn road to Silicon Valley. He also tells the story of hacking into a global carmaker's internal network from a Tel Aviv office, using nothing but a component removed from a car.

Produced and edited by Gadi Zaig and Shifra Jacobs.

Israel is winning on every front, and Brig. Gen. (res.) Erez Winner says the next war is already being armed inside Israel's own borders. In his first weeks as chairman of the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF–HaBithonistim), Winner sits down with Anna Ahronheim to argue that Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas have all been militarily defeated, and that the threat Israel is least prepared for is domestic: smuggled illegal weapons, organized crime in Arab society, and an armed Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria that could turn its guns the day Mahmoud Abbas dies.

On Gaza, the former head of Southern Command operational planning is blunt about why the war dragged on: "The failure of not ending this war long ago is a military failure." Israel, he says, spent 2024 fighting Hamas with one hand and feeding it with the other. Winner spent over a decade drawing the IDF's operational plans in the Southern Command, from Protective Edge through the current war, which makes his critique unusually specific.

He calls the Lebanon agreement a genius move, the first time an Arab state has signed with Israel and gotten no territory in return, warns that Turkey, not Iran, is the long-term rival in a contest over the India–Middle East–Europe corridor, and diagnoses what he calls the "unprofessional professionalism" of an army whose officers rotate every two years and let industry decide what it buys.

He closes with rapid-fire answers on Israel's biggest blind spot, the one mistake it keeps repeating in Gaza, and the single reform he'd make to national security decision-making tomorrow.

Produced and edited by Gadi Zaig, Lara Sukster Mosheyof, and Shifra Jacobs.

Quantum computing has no dominant player yet, and that, argues deep tech investor Zach Fagan, is exactly why Israel's next category-defining company may come from it.

Zach Fagan is a partner at Earth & Beyond Ventures, one of the only early-stage funds in Israel dedicated entirely to deep tech. In this conversation with Jerusalem Post defense correspondent Anna Ahronheim, he argues that the constraint on AI progress is no longer the processor: the trouble is delivering power to the chips, dissipating the heat, and moving data across the interconnect. His analogy is blunt: a GPU that can handle a thousand data points is worthless if the wire between components only moves a hundred at a time. On quantum, he is equally direct: no one has succeeded in deploying a full-stack, end-to-end quantum computer that does something genuinely useful, and unlike the SaaS era, more capital does not reliably produce better outcomes in deep tech.

Fagan also pushes back on a story Israel likes to tell about itself. Battle-tested founders are not unique to Israel; plenty of US and Ukrainian defense tech founders have deployed too. What Israel actually has, he says, is the feedback loop: the military, the reserves, the front, and the defense primes are all in the same backyard, so a founder called up mid-build returns with the next product idea. The flip side is a mismatch with American capital. Scarcity creates hyper-focus; abundance creates the ambition to build a platform. Israeli founders arrive having solved one problem exceptionally well, while US investors are looking for the next Raytheon, the next Boeing, the next defense prime that owns the whole stack.

The interview also covers electronic warfare and the spectrum as the likeliest source of Israel's next breakthrough defense company, why Europe's militarization comes with a "show me your Europe angle" condition attached, space as a live theater rather than a coming one, and why Israel should stop worrying about not owning fabs and keep owning chip design instead.

Produced and edited by Gadi Zaig and Shifra Jacobs.

Since October 7, Israel's defense R&D directorate has pushed weapons from concept to combat in weeks, and now works with more than 300 startups. Col. Yishai Cohen explains how.

In this episode of Defense & Tech by The Jerusalem Post, Anna Ahronheim sits down with Col. Yishai Cohen, a senior official at MAFAT, Israel's Directorate of Defense Research and Development, for a rare look inside the organization that decides which technologies reach Israeli soldiers, and how fast. Cohen describes software fixes pushed to live weapon systems within days of October 7, capabilities against Iran that spent two decades in development before being fired for the first time, and others assembled in the final weeks before the fighting began. On Iran's long-range drone campaign, he is blunt: more than 1,500 fixed-wing UAVs were launched at Israel, and he says only two hits were recorded. "Low tech works," he says of the improvised fishing nets soldiers used against short-range drones, a reminder that the most sophisticated answer is not always the right one.

The interview is also a candid account of what Israel has not solved. Cohen concedes that fiber-optic drones, cheap, unjammable, and impossible to defeat by electronic warfare, remain an open race, one that Ukraine has pushed further than anyone. An open call for counter-solutions drew over 300 proposals, and recent purchase orders running to hundreds of millions of shekels have split roughly 50-50 between Israel's legacy defense giants and small startups. He is equally frank about Israel's thin position in autonomous maritime systems, about Iran's deeply buried missile and nuclear infrastructure, and about the strategic lesson he says will define the next decade: Israel must be able to manufacture what it designs, at scale, at home, regardless of what happens abroad.

Cohen also addresses the question dominating Israeli venture circles: whether defense tech is a bubble. His answer, and his explanation of why a small purchase order from the Ministry of Defense can unlock a funding round five to ten times its size, is essential listening for anyone tracking where Israeli engineering talent is going now that cyber is no longer the only destination.

Produced and edited by Gadi Zaig and Shifra Jacobs.

Former NSA Director and US Cyber Command chief Admiral Mike Rogers warns that the Iran ceasefire has resolved none of the underlying threats — missiles, proxies, or the nuclear program — and that Iran's Revolutionary Guard is now more powerful and more aggressive than before the conflict began.

Admiral Rogers, who led both the NSA and US Cyber Command as a four-star Navy admiral before moving to the private sector with Team8 and Aurelius Capital, delivers a sobering assessment: the ceasefire bought time but solved nothing. On Iran's posture, he argues that the war produced the opposite of what the US and Israel hoped; rather than deterring Tehran, it has convinced the Revolutionary Guard to double down. "The takeaway is to be more aggressive," he explains of the IRGC's internal argument. He also flags a new and underappreciated threat: Iran now understands it holds an economic weapon in its ability to disrupt Gulf commercial shipping, and will make that a foundational element of strategy going forward.

On cybersecurity, Rogers breaks from the dominant narrative: while the world obsesses over AI-powered attacks, almost no one is deploying AI defensively. He argues that a determined attacker will eventually get in, and that resilience, not just defense, must become the new standard. He explains why he believes Israel and Silicon Valley are the only two places in the world with the culture, talent, and capital to solve this problem at scale.

Hilla Haddad Chmelnik certified the Iron Dome for combat, led Israel's national innovation policy, and now aims to make cargo delivery to orbit as routine as a courier shipment, at a few hundred dollars per kilo.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Chmelnik reveals that the Iron Dome was built on what we now call machine learning long before the term existed, and that she would not redesign a single component today. She explains how her startup, Moonshot Space, is developing a kinetic launch system: ground-based electromagnetic acceleration that pushes payloads to orbit without rockets, cutting launch costs dramatically. 

"We want to be the FedEx to space," she says. On Israel's strategic future, her warning is blunt: if Israel fails to plant a flag on the moon, it risks becoming geopolitically irrelevant: "We will not be a country."

Chmelnik also offers a rare insider critique of Israel's innovation gap: the country ranks top 10-15 globally in AI readiness but is trending downward, is failing to tap Arab citizens, ultra-Orthodox, and peripheral communities for top talent, and still lacks a civilian space law separating commercial from defense use. She draws a direct line from the trauma of living under rocket fire to the entrepreneurial resilience that makes Israel's startup ecosystem unique, and predicts a post-war startup boom once veterans get two to three years of quiet academic time.

Iran has struck 37 commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and ships are now going dark at a rate 600% higher than before. Windward CEO Ami Daniel, who nearly died when Hezbollah hit his Navy ship in 2006, explains what's really happening at sea.

In the latest Defense and Tech by the Jerusalem Post podcast, host Anna Ahronheim sits down with Ghil Hardy, VP of Business Development at Cando and the ROM360 initiative.Cando, whose tagline is "You dream it, we drone it," delivers a 360-degree turnkey solution combining products, services, and AI analytics, built by founders who include former IDF leaders who helped establish Israel's UAV units.The highlight of this episode is the discussion on how deones can impact the future of health. Hardy mentioned that Cando is conducting tests in order to make future organ transportations via drone a reality.

Host Anna Ahronheim sits down with Tomer Malchi, founder and CEO of ASIO Technologies, whose Orion handheld system has been in the hands of IDF troops for nearly a decade, to unpack the rapid transformation of ground warfare. From GPS spoofing during the Iran campaign, to "ground dominance" as a new operational doctrine, to the uncomfortable truth that "a nice chunk" of Israeli combat casualties have come from friendly fire, Malchi makes the case that the individual warfighter, not the fighter jet, is now the center of gravity in modern combat. Malchi explains why "nobody dared to say" the words ground dominance before the recent conflicts, how the Ukraine drone war reshaped every land army on the planet "within a few years only," and why aerial assets vanish the moment a major campaign like Iran opens, leaving battalions to fight without GPS, without communications, and often without higher command. He details how ASIO's Orion turns ordinary battalions into "super battalions" through augmented reality, real-time 3D terrain rendering generated by drones, and an optical data-sharing method that lets soldiers operate completely off-grid. He also reveals that one of Orion's most-used capabilities turned out to be one his team didn't initially design for: friendly fire prevention.